Dissertation

Implicating others: Autobiography as activism in Georges Bataille and William S. Burroughs

Kendall, Stuart Todd

2002

Overview

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) utilized methodologies rooted in modernist collage as a means of attacking the structures of recognition and identification on which subjectivity, in their view, is based. Central to their theory and practice is the view that the human form is something that must be radically assaulted. Significantly, both avant-gardists concentrated their assaults on images of themselves and did so in such a way as to implicate their readers into a process of self-modification that is in no way distinction from social modification. Part one examines several major theories of autobiography and of avant-gardism. Herein avant-gardism refers to a mode of aesthetic activism in which an artist uses art as a means of active engagement with culture as a historical process. On the side of autobiography, Serge Doubrovsky's concept of “autofiction”—a mode of autobiography in which the self is actively created—is considered particularly relevant to this study. After contextualizing Bataille's turn from political avant-gardism to autobiographical avant-gardism in 1939, part two outlines the mode of experience which is the central figure of Bataille's autobiographical activism and discuss this mode as a response to and critique of the utilitarian models of physics, history, and consciousness developed by René Descartes and G. W. F. Hegel. After extracting a method of autobiographical meditation from Bataille's writings and practices, demonstrate this method as it functions in the texts of La Somme athéologique . After contextualizing Burroughs's work within the history of the avant-garde and surveying several trends in its critical appropriation, part three elaborates Burroughs's basic philosophical position, that the human form as we know it is the product of a mutation caused by a radioactive virus. For Burroughs, freedom from the human condition will require further mutation, effected by adopting the methods of the virus. After outlining Burroughs's theory and practice of viral writing, viral sounds and recordings, and viral images, I demonstrate these practices as they appear in Burroughs's autobiographical activism.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American literature / Biographies / Burroughs, William S (1914-1997) / Cage, John / Comparative literature / Gide, Andre-Paul-Guillaume (1869-1951) / Ginsberg, Allen (1926-1997) / Godard, Jean-Luc (1930-2022) / Lefebvre, Henri (1901-1991) / Mailer, Norman / Oe, Kenzaburo (1935- ) / Rimbaud, Jean Nicholas Arthur (1854-1891) / Romance literature
• ISBN: 9780496411726, 0496411721